Carlo Purassanta: “A growth mindset to overcome social and market challenges“. There are (also) soft skills behind the new Microsoft.

Do you want to experiment innovation? You have to prepare yourself to do it. Carlo Purassanta, Microsoft Italy’s CEO, has no doubts. The only way to perform and keep on changing as our society requires is to have a “growth mindset” to find new opportunities and experiment. Once again, soft skills are crucial. In this interview, Microsoft Italy’s CEO country manager tells us his key soft skills.

Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software. What can be the role that software has for growing, developing and enhancing human resources?

According to our vision digital is a great enabler of people and organizations’ success. Using communication tools such as Skype between people who live far away from each other, improving our collaboration thanks to “Teams” within Office 365, more in general leveraging Cloud Computing, which allow all of us to have all the latest information always at hand and to share everything from any device while we’re on the move: these are just some basic examples of how Microsoft solutions can enable people and organizations on the planet to achieve more.

Today we are preparing another revolution with intelligent technology and artificial intelligence, which were the focus of the Microsoft Forum www.microsoftforum.it.

After decades of dreaming, experimenting, and frankly, often failing, to create and harness the promise of Artificial Intelligence, we believe that we are on the cusp of realizing its potential. We’re at an inflection point arising from access to vast amounts of data and enough computing power in the cloud to enable machines to, understand and learn.

However, as we imagine — and make real — the possibility of this technology to shape our world, the notion that it’s at all ‘artificial’ is outdated. Rather, it’s intelligent. Natural. Ambient. It’s all around us, working on our behalf and under our control.

Our ambition is bigger and our vision has people at the center. We want to empower everyone to do more, and less. By harnessing and making real the promise of intelligent technology, we see the opportunity to help everyone find more time and more space to be more … human.

Intelligent technology will change how the world does business, creates new and better products, builds stronger and more effective organizations, and better serves customers.

Our ambition is broader.

We are committed to deploying intelligent technology to benefit a greater good, to democratize its potential. And the impact will be profound. We will empower students, innovators, inventors, researchers, and application developers with our tools, our software brainpower and our uniquely powerful, global-scale cloud computing capabilities.

Microsoft House (Italy) – DIGITAL CLASS.

Eggup deals with soft skills assessment. From your professional background, what is your main “soft skill”?

I am a curious person, able to imagine new roads and determined in pursuing them with the team. I bring energy into working groups and in the work of each individual, because I think it’s one of the key objectives of a leader. I support my team in embracing new ways, even taking on risks. Basically, it’s natural for me to always look beyond and activate every possible lever to build our success together.

Speaking of soft skills, in your opinion, on which soft skills should Italian innovators should emerge and release the untapped potential of the our country?

As I wrote here, the macro-economic situation in our country is, in my opinion, the result of a serious and persistent lack of confidence in our ability to change course and transform Italy, accelerate the growth of our historical businesses, create new businesses, modernize teaching and Public Administration.

Resilience and optimism are the main two values ​​to be strengthened and spread at all levels to make sure that our potential can fully express itself.

Microsoft House (Italy) – LOFT.

In Microsoft we love to talk about “growth mindset“, a mental approach that allows us to have great confidence in ourselves and in our abilities, to try new roads quickly and to recognize the mistakes just as quickly as finding the solutions. Then again, one of the main reasons for the success that analysts attribute to Microsoft in the new era of our Global CEO, Satya Nadella, is this mindset that we have been able to spread throughout the organization and that leads us to embrace change with confidence in order to study new solutions that can enable the success of individuals and organizations around the world.